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BYOD: Bring Your Own Device

by The SSC Team

Ah, dinner is over, the kids are in bed and you have a cold beverage handy. It’s time to check your work email! How many of us have fallen into this habit? As businesses persuade us to be available 24/7, we’ve seen various ways to make that availability easier and more enticing:

– Providing us with access to work email and servers from home PCs.

– Providing us with laptops so we can lug them back and forth every day.

– Providing us with smartphones so we can check our e-mail from anywhere.

– Letting us work from home for that true 24/7 experience.

But we’ve pushed back, insisting on having a say in what devices we use. Enough of the dictates from the I.T. department; we want devices that are easy to use, even if we have to bring them from home. Of course, we’ll tolerate security requirements from our companies to avoid a Wild West environment in that regard.

Blackberries and iPhones began the “bring your own device” movement a few years ago. Nowadays, who doesn’t have a smartphone? And if the screen isn’t big enough to get “real work” done, there’s always a tablet, with or without a cell plan.

There’s a ripple effect to this movement. When the bean counters at work figure out they can postpone capital expenditures for computer upgrades, Microsoft and Dell will start to worry. But that is exactly what is happening. Even with an April 2014 cutoff date from Microsoft for Windows XP support, over 37% of us still use XP on the Web. And the bad publicity Windows 8 is getting isn’t convincing us to upgrade either. We’ll stick with our Apple iOS and Android devices as long as they can do the job.

So, in the vernacular of street racers, “Run what ya brung” and have some fun while doing it. Just don’t spill that cold beverage on it!